Looking for the best social media platform for B2B lead generation and brand awareness? LinkedIn is what you’re after.
LinkedIn is a business social media platform with a vast community of working professionals and businesses. It’s an excellent platform for free exposure to new connections to grow partnerships, generate leads, and build brand trust. It’s a place to showcase your thought leadership through native articles, highlight content from your business website, and promote your brand within your industry.
The LinkedIn community is focused on B2B networking and relationship building, and it brings entrepreneurs, thought leaders, and executive-level leaders of all kinds together.
Here are some recent statistics that showcase who is engaging on LinkedIn and how marketers and businesses use the platform.
- LinkedIn has 810 million members, with 57% of users identifying as men and 43% identifying as women. There are also 58 million companies on LinkedIn.
- Almost 60% of LinkedIn’s users are between 25 and 34 years old, which isn’t a surprise as it’s a professional platform that helps those starting and growing their careers.
- 49 million people use LinkedIn to search for jobs each week.
- 93% of B2B content marketers use LinkedIn for organic social marketing, with 77% saying LinkedIn produces the best organic results of any social platform.
- Companies that post weekly on LinkedIn see a 2x higher engagement rate.
If LinkedIn sounds like a good fit for your brand, get started by incorporating the best practices below.
Make sure to get in touch with our team at JB Media to take your LinkedIn marketing strategy to the next level.
Best Practices for Organic LinkedIn Posts
A solid organic LinkedIn strategy can help you achieve your marketing goals and reach unique LinkedIn members that you can’t engage with elsewhere. Here are a few of our best practices to make sure your marketing efforts don’t go to waste on this professional network.
- Update your LinkedIn company page and personal LinkedIn page to make them more visually engaging and SEO-friendly. Add a description, company hashtags, customized button, etc.
- Share content consistently (at least 3x per week).
- Use relevant hashtags; 1-2 per post.
- Use high-quality imagery and copy in your LinkedIn posts. Post shareable graphics that break down long blog posts from your website. Post and share links to blog posts and other relevant content.
- Follow, engage, and whenever possible, collaborate with other industry thought leaders.
- Encourage engagement with followers by responding to all comments.
- Pique interest within the industry by providing resources, education content, thought leadership articles, etc. that your audience can’t find elsewhere.
- Share videos whenever possible. Studies show that LinkedIn video content drives 3X more engagement than plain text posts. This is the case across the majority of social platforms.
- Ask any partners, staff members, and leaders with personal LinkedIn profiles to follow your page, list the page as an employer (if applicable), and engage with at least one piece of content each week, preferably by commenting on the post or sharing to their account.
- Join LinkedIn groups (from your personal account) that are applicable within your industry. Share your content and thought leadership in those groups, but make sure not to be spammy or overpromotional.
Best Practices for Paid LinkedIn Ads
LinkedIn offers a viable advertising platform for B2B marketers. You can choose from a wide variety of targeting options for LinkedIn ads, including things like job title and company name, which you can’t choose for ads on other social networks.
Here are a few of our best practices for LinkedIn advertising.
- Don’t hyper-target. A good rule of thumb is to keep your target audience more than 50,000 for Sponsored Content and Text Ads, and more than 15,000 for Message and InMail Ads.
- Be specific with ad targeting, but not so specific that you narrow your audience. Choose the location and two other targeting criteria to start. And then keep experimenting!
- An image size of 1200 x 628 pixels is recommended for LinkedIn ads, but 1200 x 1200 pixels and 1080 × 1920 pixels also work well. Content with larger visuals tends to get up to 38% higher click-through rates (CTRs).
- Try out different versions of ads to see which performs best with your audience. Turn off least performing ads after a few weeks to allocate the budget to the top performers.
- Feature a clear call-to-action (CTA) so your audience knows exactly how to act on their interest.
- Keep your description concise if you can. Anything more than 150 characters could be truncated on a desktop, so keep this in mind and avoid going too far over the recommended length.
- Install the LinkedIn Insight Tag on your website to track conversions and enable demographic reporting on your website visitors.
While you’re setting up your LinkedIn marketing plan, just remember: LinkedIn is an online space where brands that are disrupting and innovating in their industries can share ideas, educate others, and collaborate.
A strong organic presence on the platform coupled with a paid strategy is a compelling way to generate more engagement for your business and accomplish your lead generation goals.
